The man finished tying up his cohort. He stood and looked at me. My question had scared him. He nodded.
“How many guards inside?”
“Two.”
He was telling the truth.
“What’s your name?”
“Alexei.”
“Take me inside, Alexei.”
I disarmed Alexei and followed him up the steps to the loading bay door, which he lifted high enough for us to duck under.
We walked onto the polished concrete floor of an empty warehouse. Lights blazed down from the rafters. I could hear the distant humming of generators.
“Take me to Feld,” I said.
Alexei led me down a drab corridor.
At the terminus, he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked a heavy steel door.
We entered a room that reminded me of an indoor exhibit in a zoo. The walls were lined with terrariums and aquariums of varying sizes, and the odor of sawdust, animal waste, and cleaning products filled the air.
We walked along a wall lined with cubbyholes behind glass. Petri dishes were visible in many of them. They were being tended to by robotic arms that squeezed solutions out of calibrated glass droppers or moved the clear dishes around to catch new angles of light or heat.
The cubbyholes became larger as we went along.
In one, I saw some kind of larvae squirming in dirt, barely visible to the naked eye.
In another, tiny pink bodies the size of cashew nuts that resembled baby mice.
Seedlings of what appeared to be evergreen trees, only with crimson needles.
There was an entire section filled with terrariums containing insects I’d never seen or imagined.
A larger cubbyhole was filled with water—a marine or riparian habitat with translucent, amorphous fish that looked like something from another planet.
We moved past even larger terrariums and aquariums.
I saw a marsupial-like creature the size of a house cat hanging upside down by three-toed claws. Its indigo eyes opened, the pupils little more than black pinpricks.
An eel with a head on each end swam through an aquarium filled with pink seagrass. It shimmered like quicksilver as electricity pulsed just beneath the surface of its skin.
I couldn’t help stopping in front of the largest habitat I’d seen so far. The glass was floor to ceiling, and the space took up roughly the size of a walk-in closet.
The creature sat in a corner of the enclosure, under the shelter of a palm frond. It reminded me of a gremlin from the 1984 movie, but with smaller ears, wings, and a less terrifying disposition.
A door at the end of the nursery swung open.
I pulled Alexei in close, held the Grach to his head.
A man in a white lab coat appeared in the doorway, and when he saw me, he smiled. Ty Feld was two inches shorter than me, with curly, grizzled black hair, bushy sideburns, and a mustache more befitting a saloon owner. The GPA had kept Feld in its sights for years. We’d never gone after him, even though we knew he lived in the penthouse of Tower of Babel and operated out of a handful of old buildings in the abandoned sprawl of Las Vegas. Officially, we’d never been told why he was off-limits, but we all knew. He was a back-alley contractor for DARPA. He sold them illicit biotech and occasionally coughed up legit intel on bioterrorists and competitors to the GPA. So all things being equal, he was allowed to run his business of exotic synthetic creatures as long as he justified the freedom he was allowed.
Behind him, two black-jacketed men with Slavic features waited in the wings.
“Little Logan Ramsay,” he said.
“Hello, Dr. Feld.”
“Here to arrest me?”
“I don’t work for the GPA anymore.”
“Here to kill me?”
“I need to borrow your lab.”
“Why would I let you do that instead of just killing you?”
“If you think you can kill me, you should definitely do that. It didn’t go well for the seven trained guards you had stationed at the loading bay, but maybe the two who are cowering behind you are the real badasses? If they want to take a shot, I’ll have to kill Alexei here. I’d rather not. Or…just spitballing…you could recognize that you’re outmatched, skip to the end.”
Dr. Feld laughed heartily. He said, “Last time I saw you, you must’ve been twelve years old. I was giving a lecture in Berkeley, and your mother invited me for dinner.”
“I was nine actually. And you stayed with us.”
“Did I?”
“We played a game of chess.”
“I don’t remember that. Who won?”
“You destroyed me in thirteen moves.”
“Excellent.” He glanced at the men behind him. “Stand down.”
I released Alexei, who moved toward Feld, his head hanging low like a chastened dog.
Feld said, “Kill him.”
One point two seconds later, all three men were dead at Feld’s feet, and I still had one round left in the gun, which I was pointing at his face.
“Sorry,” he said. “I had to see for myself.”
“So you’re building dragons now?” I asked, gesturing toward the largest habitat.
“You’d be surprised how much people are willing to pay for a brand-new life-form that no one else has ever seen. Once I’ve perfected the design, I’ll sell this guy for fifty million.”
“Can it actually fly?”
“No. But the wings flap. Unfortunately, it isn’t capable of breathing fire.”
“You tried?”
“We explored the idea. There are creatures in the animal kingdom that can certainly withstand temperature extremes. We looked at the genome for the Pompeii worm, which lives near hydrothermal vents in temperatures above 170 degrees Fahrenheit. We looked at Alaskan wood frogs and the water bear tardigrades, which can survive down to almost absolute zero. But there’s no internal biological structure in the animal kingdom, at least that I’ve discovered, that can withstand a thousand degrees.” He laughed. “And I wouldn’t begin to know how to build an organ capable of producing and expelling fire.”
“Did it gestate in an existing species or is it lab grown?”
“Lab grown in a synthetic, freestanding uterus. We call him Smaug.”
It didn’t look like the mighty, mythical dragon. It looked, well…kind of pitiful.
Its skin was spiky, hard, and pebbled. I suspected they’d borrowed some DNA from the crocodile genome. Its hind paws resembled the legs of a Komodo dragon.
The creature’s eyes opened—reptilian and otherworldly. It gazed at us through the glass.
“This is a highly imperfect creature,” Feld said. “As it grew, its mass increased a bit faster than its bone cross-sections could handle. We just finished somatically editing the bones to increase their size and density. Should know if we were successful in the next few weeks.”
The dragon moved out from under the palm fronds, dipped its angular head to a small pool of water, and began to drink.
“Why are you here?” Feld asked.
“Seen the news out of Glasgow?”
“Of course. I heard the military is building a perimeter around the city. They’re fencing everyone in.”
I brought him up to speed on everything, and when I finished, he threw his head back and laughed for a long time. Until there were tears in his eyes.